Regular blood tests help us to stay healthy. By monitoring our body’s chemistry, we can detect subtle signs of dysfunction before they become serious health conditions.
“I had a blood test done, and my doctor said everything is normal… but I know something is off.”
The Limitations of Standard Medical Testing
Many patients receive a “normal” result on their blood tests despite feeling unwell. This discrepancy can occur because standard tests don’t provide a comprehensive view of an individual’s health. Cholesterol usually takes center stages while other important markers are omitted. Functional medicine addresses this gap by incorporating a broader array of tests, offering a more detailed clinical picture.
Decoding Your Blood Test Results
Blood test reports typically feature three columns:
1. Reference Ranges: the ‘normal’ values representing a ‘healthy’ population.
2. Results: your specific results.
3. Abnormal: your results that fall outside the normal ranges.
This is fairly straightforward; however defining ‘abnormal’ can be challenging.
Historical Perspective
Historically, reference ranges on blood tests were narrower, allowing for early detection of anomalies. During the 1990s, these ranges were widened in response to steady declines in the population’s health. One example is Mean Corpuscular Volume (MCV), which measures the average size of red blood cells. The reference ranges have expanded from 82-91 fL to 78-98 fL. Elevated MCV is associated with pernicious anemia and neurological dysfunction, however when detected early, this can be prevented with vitamin B12 or folic acid supplementation.
Influence of Pharmaceutical Companies
The development of reference ranges is not immune from bias. Pharmaceutical companies often impact clinical guidelines by controlling study design and outcomes to align with their interests, potentially skewing the interpretation of blood tests.
Conclusion
Understanding blood tests requires specialized knowledge and an awareness of how historical changes have shaped current standards. Practitioners of functional medicine typically use many stringent reference ranges from the past to assess the health of their patients. In doing so, the focus shifts from disease detection toward maintaining good health.